Customer Reviews

Civil War Days: Discover the Past with Exciting Projects, Games, Activities, and Recipes

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Are you looking to enhance your students' understanding of life during the Civil War? If you want students to appreciate the daily drudgery and simplicity of this era, King offers numerous projects that are historically accurate and developmentally appropriate for the gifted to special needs students.

Besides offering unique insights into American's daily lives, historical perspective is also addressed. In addition to providing readers a bibliography and index, a glossary is included for readers.

Students of American history will delight in creating and designing hands-on activites.

While this book does a nice job providing projects which represent Civil War TIMES, it does very little to enhance a study of the actual WAR.

Most projects are handicrafts, cooking projects or children's games. There are patterns for several different kinds of dolls, pastimes children of the day might have engaged in (flower pressing, for example) and games like hopscotch and mankala.

There is a narrative story woven throughout touching on the lives of a Southern white family who lives in Charleston and is anti-slavery and a black family living in the North. These are perhaps perspectives which are otherwise under-represented in other books about the Civil War, so that is a plus, but I don't know that it was truly representative of Civil War DAYS. Keep in mind that these are just two of many perspectives of the times.

The directions for the projects are clear and the projects nicely support the narrative, but I was really looking for projects which enhanced our study of the WAR. Only two projects even touch on this: a flag of Fort Sumter and a recipe for hardtack.

This might help to build perspective on the times, but is not a useful resource for studying the war itself.